Repotting

BY Diana Holman & Ginger Pape

Identifying Your Personal Touchstone

Looking at Life Through a Kaleidoscope

Successful repotters have found that they need to be proactive, not reactive, in planning a redesigned life. The world today offers so many options, opportunities, challenges, and experiences at such an accelerated pace that it’s easy to live your schedule instead of your life. A central tenet of repotting is setting priorities based on your values so that the choices you make are reflective of the kind of meaningful existence you want to have.

Women today are looking through a kaleidoscope. As they deal with changing priorities—a promotion, the birth of a child, or a rekindled interest in a specific talent or hobby—some things come into focus while others become blurred and no longer receive total attention. As women turn the base of the kaleidoscope, the pattern changes, with new shapes becoming more sharply defined. They’re blending their needs, wants, and Have To’s into an integrated lifestyle that offers fulfillment over time, although not necessarily on a day-to-day basis.

We know that you’re in continual flux, and that you’re often making adjustments of all kinds. Nevertheless, planning for a redesigned life requires a thoughtful assessment of whether your core values and priorities are in sync with your activities.

What do we mean by “core values”? In the past 15 years, we’ve listened to women from all walks of life in our focus groups and interviews. The overwhelming majority of them share a group of priorities that shape their lives. The top-12 list below reflects this research, but is by no means all-inclusive. When you do the “Values Orbit” exercise in this chapter, feel free to add to the list anything that you feel is crucial to your life.

Imagine yourself at the center of your own solar system. If you’re the “sun,” so to speak, the planets are your values in orbit around you. At any given time, the most important ones will be closest to you, in the Mercury, Venus, and Earth orbits. Those of lesser importance at this point in time will be in the Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and outer planets’ positions, circling you at the farthest edges of your solar system.

Recognize that some of your values may actually be in the outer orbits, even though you want them to be a priority, because you’ve been unable to focus on them for a variety of reasons. For instance, you may want to travel and see the world, but family responsibilities or finances are keeping you close to home. Or you may feel that there’s something missing in your life, such as a spiritual component, but you haven’t yet found a way to include it in your inner circles. The purpose of the following exercise is to show you in black-and-white whether the life you’re living is truly the one you want to lead.

Sample Values Orbit

Exercise: Draw Your Values Orbit

For these three steps, refer to the Values Orbit section of your Repotting 101 Workbook or use your own materials (you’ll need several pieces of unlined paper).

Step 1: To construct your current Values Orbit, take a piece of plain paper and draw yourself as the sun in the middle, with 12 other concentric circles around you representing the planets. Look at the list of top-12 values above. Decide which ones are most important to you at this time and write them into the Mercury position.

You may have more than one in each ring. For instance, you may feel that relationships, career, and finances are of equal importance; if so, place them all in the Mercury orbit. Write your lesser priorities into the other orbits. If you have a value or priority not on our top-12 list, now is the time to place it on your chart where it belongs. In addition, your Values Orbit may not contain everything in our top-12 list. That’s okay—remember, this is your life.

Once you’ve completed the diagram of your current Values Orbit, set aside time to consider whether this values hierarchy accurately reflects how you want your life to look. For instance, maybe “giving back” corresponds with Pluto (which is now technically designated as a “dwarf planet”), but you’ve been thinking about your affluent and self-oriented lifestyle and feeling uneasy about the lack of time you’re devoting to others. You may need to investigate how to move the philanthropic value at least as close to the sun as the Earth orbit.

Or perhaps your family, which you’ve placed in an outer ring, has been shortchanged because you’ve been working long hours and traveling for work. Assuming that family time is important to you, you may need to evaluate what steps you have to take in order to move this category into an inner orbit. Do you need to find a new job, or is there some other solution?

It’s important to invest time and effort into analyzing your current Values Orbit and to be completely honest with yourself. Without this self-evaluation, you can’t create a clear plan for your new garden landscape.

Step 2: Take a second piece of plain paper and draw a second solar system. Again, you’re in the center, in the sun position. Now it’s time to visualize the life you truly want. In this case, you’ll place the values from the top-12 list (and any others of your choice) in orbits according to where you’d like them to be.

We realize that this plan for your new Values Orbit isn’t going to become a reality overnight. We suggest that you do this exercise several times over the course of a month or more—whatever period of time it takes for you to feel comfortable that the organization of the values on your diagram reflects the life you desire. For example, we know that it will take time and hard work for you to move fitness front and center in your life, if that’s what you’ve decided is important to you. But the very first step is committing yourself to this newly acknowledged goal. Just as there are no instant gardens, there’s no shortcut to a new Values Orbit. In coming chapters, we’ll help you create the base plan (as landscape designers call it), and plant the life garden that will match your desired priorities.

Step 3: Revisit your Values Orbit maps, comparing your current one and your revised version. Look at what you’ve newly placed in the orbits closest to you. Has it occurred to you that one of these may represent a touchstone—your innermost passion—that will reveal hidden desires in your life? Now that you’ve done this exercise, have you finally uncovered and brought to the surface a passion that you’ve allowed to lie fallow but now want to cultivate?

One repotter was surprised by the results of doing this exercise. She told us that crocheting had been an interest and love of hers since her teen years, when her grandmother taught her this art. Recognizing the great satisfaction she derived from her hobby, she moved it from the outer reaches of her solar system to the Venus orbit (the second ring) around her “sun.” She’d never had—or made—the time to pursue this passion, but realized that she wanted it back in her life, front and center. In addition, she loved it so much that she was motivated to start a crocheting business from her home and now sells her handicrafts at local hospitals and nursing homes. Just as it did for this woman, this exercise may unleash the hidden blossoms—or desires—in your life and put you in touch with a motivating passion that will help you determine how you’ll repot your life.

The preceding is excerpted from the book Repotting: 10 Steps for Redesigning Your Life By Diana Holman & Ginger Pape. It is published by Hay House (March 2007) and available at all stores or online at www.hayhouse.com.